The incidence and range of homeworking

Abstract

How many people do homework, what kind of work they do and whether it is increasing are the first questions people ask about homeworking in Britain. They also want to know who supplies homework, and how many suppliers there are. None of these questions have a simple answer, for each gives rise to yet another: how would we know? Comparatively little is known about these aspects of homeworking in quantitative terms, and this makes it all the more necessary to examine how existing estimates of the extent of homeworking have been calculated. Otherwise there is, in our experience, a marked tendency to assume certain kinds of answers to these questions, and to rely on them in making arguments about the scale and nature of homeworking in Britain.